Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028 <comment><USER2> The TED Talk mentioned: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intel...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html)

Or a link to the MP4 version: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/download/video/4555/talk/...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/download/video/4555/talk/261)

</comment><comment><USER3> Crows are technically the most intelligent birds, but people expect parrots to be due to their speech capabilities.

<comment><USER4> From Wikipedia:

Intelligence

As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, and Aesop's fable of The Crow and the Pitcher shows that humans have long viewed the crow as an intelligent animal. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Certain species top the avian IQ scale. Crows in the northwestern U.S. show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens. Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing. Crows will engage in a kind of mid-air jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order.

One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has also been intensively studied recently because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day search for food, including dropping seeds into a heavy trafficked street and waiting for a car to crush them open. On October 5, 2007, researchers from the University of Oxford, England presented data acquired by mounting tiny video cameras on the tails of New Caledonian Crows. It turned out that they use a larger variety of tools than previously known, plucking, smoothing and bending twigs and grass stems to procure a variety of foodstuffs. Crows in Queensland Australia have learned how to eat the toxic cane toad by flipping the cane toad on its back and violently stabbing the throat where the skin is thinner, allowing the crow to access the non-toxic innards; their long beaks ensure that all of the innards can be removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Crows "finding" money is problematic, as it might not be "lost"... intelligence (evolution, flow of water, etc) has a way of finding the shortest path. It seems tricky to specify the goal clearly, so the crows are trained to find only "lost" money. Perhaps only reward them for coins that were on the ground? As opposed to in someone's pocket, purse, on a shop counter, in a cash register, in a bank... hmm, this experiment could end badly.

Crows more intelligent than monkeys, he claims in the following (1 min) video. Could that be true? [http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/03/taking_over_the_...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/03/taking_over_the_world_one_crow_1.html)

 _We try to kill off adaptive pests like roaches, rats and crows, but we're breeding them to be parasites ... a better goal ... is to seek an interspecies harmony._

Lovely idea! Reminds me of how parasites became symbiotes, then integrated, as has been argued for some cellular machinery (eg mitochondria and chloroplasts) by Lynn Margulis: <http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3IIWSOA7G9YKL> . It also reminds me of "The Evolution of Cooperation" _Axelrod_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation>

</comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting. Thanks for the TED link. But is there a reason why he is not showing an actual crow dropping a coin in the box? All he shows is a drawing and then he describes what happens.

</comment><comment><USER7> Students who captured crows for tagging the first time were continually harrassed by the birds afterwards.

Now when students capture birds for tagging they wear masks and hats.

</comment><comment><USER5> linked TED talk: "Can we domesticate germs?" [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_do...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs.html)

I think there's no reason for infections to be harmful. Why not an infection that benefits the host? Some do, for examples the bacteria in your gut, that help you digest food.

How could we hack the environment to favour beneficial infections?</comment>


An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems in Academic Research - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 <comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=efficiency+comparison+document+pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=efficiency+comparison+document+preparation#!/story/forever/0/efficiency%20comparison%20document%20preparation)

</comment><comment><USER3> I only read the abstract, but it seems to imply that they believed that the end result from using Word and the end result from using LaTeX were the same. That is, they were two techniques to achieve the same goal. But LaTeX users don't choose it because they think it makes them faster typists -- they use it because they feel the end result is of objectively higher quality as a typeset document. This may make the statement "you can do it faster in Word" moot or inaccurate because "it" is something different.

<comment><USER4> However, by their measure, the results that were prepared in LaTeX were inferior to the results created in in Word. Even for papers that were heavy on equations. So while the LaTeX users would think they create a better end- product, this isn't actually true under the quality metric used in the study.

I have created academic work both in LaTex and in Word and while I have not measured it in an objective way I also had the feeling that LaTeX could create better looking results once you've got over the first hump.

On the other hand, the integrated nature of a system like Word were spellchecking, annotations etc. are all part of the main tool you work with makes it very effective. It takes pretty long however to develop a workflow that avoids all the pitfalls.

In a sense, LaTex makes you believe that once you got over the initial hump, you have typesetting super powers but you will miss out on some of the integrated UI stuff that may boost productivity. Word on the other hand makes you believe that you already know everything while you still need to keep fine-tuning your workflow until you don't mess up constantly.

<comment><USER5> > However, by their measure, the results that were prepared in LaTeX were > inferior to the results created in in Word.

They didn't measure the quality of the typesetting in any fashion, though, which is what the GP's claim was about; they measured the rate of errors typists made under time pressure.

It's also unclear what LaTeX software they used, since the one I use has integrated spellcheck, etc.

<comment><USER4> > It's also unclear what LaTeX software they used, since the one I use has > integrated spellcheck, etc.

That's a hugely important point and in a way it shows that they are comparing apples and oranges. Word is a complete document editing system (well, more or less) while LaTeX is a type setting systems and you need additional tools to use it. Those tools can range from a simple plain-text editor (say, nano) to totally integrated environments that are similar to word in their feature set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "For example, LaTeX users in our study attained better performance in the typesetting of mathematical equations, and it is not surprising that LaTeX users are typically in disciplines where mathematical formulas are frequent (e.g., mathematics, engineering, or computer science)." I see. So, when you get a better measurement for Word, it's because it's a better tool. When you get a better measurement for LaTeX, it's because your user population is different. I think we're done here.

<comment><USER6> I dont think that text means what you think it means =P

It is in a paragraph saying "different tools for different jobs"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This study has been debunked previous here on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

Most of the study is, to be honest, bullshit.

<comment><USER8> Hmm. It seems that most of the arguments against the study were for the limited time allowed, and for the act of "reproducing" a target document.

IMHO, those are honest goals for a test. Your target may be your university's (publisher's, peer's) expected format which will cause a drop in your grade (pay, funding) if you miss. I also feel that we are frequently time constrained when trying to get work done, so I don't feel that the criticism against that is legitimate.

Now then, this is certainly not the definitive study to decide which is better, Word or LaTEx, but it's certainly an important study for those who want to be productive and have a particular format for a document that they need to match.

<comment><USER9> Much of the beauty of latex is the fact that you don't have to 'aim' at a target document, because it's already easy to get a decent looking paper together with about ten minutes of copy/paste formatting. You don't HAVE to worry about it because it's already producing a good document! Granted, you CAN make arbitrary layouts with latex, but the beauty is in the macro system removing the need to think about the layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree that I'd be faster getting a small document done in Word than in Latex.

But when the document gets huge: ToC, key phrase index, quotes half-way in the margin, output to several paper sizes, multi-page tables, both footnotes AND endnotes, source code listings, a large number of references to journals... In that case I'm glad I used Latex for the smaller documents, because now I'm acquainted to it in time for the big thing.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you except for:

> multi-page tables

You won't be able to persuade me that's easier in LaTeX than Word! I say that as an otherwise very proficient LaTeX user who finds himself much more productive with LaTeX than Word.

As for this study, I imagine it's a question of proficiency–good LaTeX users will be better with LaTeX, and good Word users will be better with Word. I have colleagues who can only barely use LaTeX, so it takes them forever, and they'd be much better off with Word. We do all our paper collaborations using Word, for example (which drives me nuts but there we go).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807497)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8797002)

</comment><comment><USER13> CS professor here - I use LaTeX, and my wife, also a professor in a different field, uses word. From watching both of our workflows over quite a time, a few things jump out very clearly:

1) LaTeX + revision control is better for multi-user concurrent collaboration. Word + track changes can get the job done for one-person-at-a-time as might be seen more often when making revisions. (We haven't compared word+revision control). But the typical Word workflow involves emailing documents to collaborators - barf.

2) LaTeX+bibtex is better for references. As far as I've been able to tell, EndNote is a steaming pile of pain that crashes frequently and takes Word for the Mac out with it. And glitches in horrible ways.

3) Word users are more likely to get their table formatting the way they want it in less time. I hate playing that game in LaTeX. Particularly if you want fancy nested stuff that looks right, is space-efficient, etc.

The study linked in this article notably omitted two of those that are quite important at least in engineering disciplines -- multi-author collaborations are the norm.

But the recommendations are asinine. In the engineering and sciences, at least, the amount of time that goes into the physical preparation of the paper, seated at your computer, writing de novo text, is _nothing_. It's trivial. You could crank out a full-length CS paper (12 pages, 2 column, 10 point text) in a few hours, were you just limited by your typing speed and the time taken to format it. If that were the case, I'd have more papers than Erdos!

<comment><USER14> > and takes Word for the Mac out with it

This is another important point.There are incompatibilities between the Windows and Mac versions of Office. I've never seen any such cross-platform issues with LaTeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've never seen effective version control of Word documents, but plain text formats such as LaTeX work as expected with git/mercurial/subversion. Very important for works with multiple authors.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are two major faults in this study:

1\. They compare only "errors", but don't have any measure of overall document quality. It's certainly the case that it's easier to make mistakes in LaTeX, but I find that people who use LaTeX tend to end up with more professional documents.

2\. They compare only on very short documents using very little time. In much the same way anything I'm going to type in 20-30 seconds is better served by Notepad than Word (mostly because Word isn't always even usable in that time window), they're failing to compare LaTeX to Word in the situations where I'd argue that the distinction matters - namely, large, complex document writing. Things with >40 hours of work involved, >100 numbered items, >50 internal references, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> Three major points were missed.

First, TeX is archival. I can still tex documents from my work in the 80s and get the same results. My MSWord files won't load. Thus, MSWord documents die.

Second, TeX allows Literate Programs. I can write a trivial program to extract my source code from TeX documents that explain the code. MSWord documents are opaque. Thus, MSWord limits what you can do with the sources.

Third, TeX is a language. I can (and do) write style files containing macros for my markup styles. In MSWord, what you see is all you are ever going to get. Thus, MSWord is fine if you can't program.

None of these features were mentioned. All of them are important, at least to me. I care that my work survives (archival), that my code can be explained (literate programming), and that I can optimize my workflow (style files).

If these additional constraints were added to the study then I think you'd find that some tasks are impossible in MSWord.

That said, this is a "bikeshed" paper. Emacs vs VI. Noise. Worse, it suffers from "hasty generalization". Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER17> Already discussed, and issues with the article itself are identified in [http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication- rev...](http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-review-of- the-plos-one-paper-comparing-ms-word-and-latex-how-not-to-compare-document- preparation)

<comment><USER18> FYI, the criticisms there are actually trivially handled by using the MathType and Endnote packages.

The biggest challenge is I work in a field where Word dominates and collaborators don't do LaTeX and journals won't accept it. So, there is very little payoff for slogging over the LaTeX hill, unfortunately. The LaTeX to Word translators all blow and Track Changes rules the world for collaborative writing.

There is no workflow that is not a pain in the ass to collaboratively write LaTeX with someone that can't use LaTeX or that sucks at LaTeX.

<comment><USER19> This is so true, I've tried Word/LaTeX collaboration twice, each time I spend more time cleaning up the conversion mess than writing the sodding paper; learn from my fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did they take into account something like version control? Because, I have a hard time seeing using Word on a collaborative paper - or even just as the single writer - being very effective in terms of version control.

<comment><USER21> This is something of a double-edged sword. Writing in LaTeX requires all the collaborators to be familiar with it - nearly everyone is familiar enough with Word to make that work, but as multidisciplinary papers become more common, the same is not necessarily true for LaTeX.

I encountered this when working with a group of both applied math people and clinicians - the applied math people all wanted to use LaTeX, but the gains just weren't worth the learning curve for the clinical co-authors.

<comment><USER9> Surely google docs is better for collaboration than word is, though, unless you're doing _serious_ math typesetting.

<comment><USER21> Google Docs is decent, though I do usually have a fair amount of math typesetting, but one of the key issues with Google Docs is you have to trust everyone doing the writing to not change the tone of the piece, etc. It's less conducive to the "Single Approving Authority" model that I've found useful in some recent papers I've written.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think time spent and performance are good metrics on the quality of the result, not meaning the output look but the quality of the work itself. Anyone that has spent some time on SQA knows that.

For the study they used a predefined text, so there's no real way to measure if there's an inherent quality on documents created using LaTeX, or if LaTeX does something to your brain to conceptualize your ideas while you are punching them on the keyboard. Or not.

        > Given these numbers it remains an open question to determine the amount of
        > taxpayer money that is spent worldwide for researchers to use LaTeX over a
        > more efficient document preparation system, which would free up their time to
        > advance their respective field. [...] We therefore suggest that leading
        > scientific journals should consider accepting submissions in LaTeX only if
        > this is justified by the level of mathematics presented in the paper. In all
        > other cases, we think that scholarly journals should request authors to
        > submit their documents in Word or PDF format.

This just sounds hasty. LaTeX may not be the tool for everybody and should not be enforced. Neither MS Word.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well this is disappointing.

I wonder if they extended the study to include Markdown would that tilt the balance somewhat. The overhead associated with LaTeX might come from the fact that there's a compile cycle to get the formatting right, although they mention Kile as an editor so that's not clear.

Markdown also has fewer features---therefore a smaller learning curve than LaTeX)---and as a frequent user of Word (and lowriter), I know I interact directly with fewer features of the wysiwyg editors, given that many features are implicit or default, whereas I must manually invoke all features that I use in a LaTeX document (those I haven't placed in a .sty file anyway).

<comment><USER24> I use markdown (in Scrivener) for my academic writing, and include raw LaTeX as needed for equations. I used Word in my masters' thesis many years ago and will never go that route again - too many issues with Word being "smart" with bullets, etc.

</comment></comment><comment> Ar-Curunir Editor of choice makes a big difference.

I can write LaTeX in Vim much faster than I can edit text anywhere else. Plus I have automatic refresh on saving and rudimentary spell check in Vim. Why would I use Word?

EDIT: Plus I have autocomplete set up that makes life even easier.

</comment><comment> Ar-Curunir Reddit discussion:

[https://pay.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/2qz6ju/postpublicati...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/2qz6ju/postpublication_review_of_the_plos_one_paper/)

</comment><comment><USER25> This has been my experience. Watched a junior dev spend 3 months of 60 hour weeks trying to create a "documentation" platform in LaTeX for what amounted to very basic algorithms.

LaTeX is a good tool, but people who use it tend to abuse it. If you need LaTeX for your solution, there's really nothing better for the job, but you rarely need LaTeX for your solution.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think LyX kind of hits the sweet spot between WYSIWYG editing, which helps immensely with tables and free text, and the power of LaTeX for equations.

One thing I never understood is why it has its own file format and doesn't operate on plain latex files. That makes interoperability with latex and in particular colaboration with non-latex users harder.

<comment><USER27> It's because LyX is a structured document editor, and its format is strictly simpler than the full power of TeX. (La)TeX isn't actually that structured, and with the ability to do weird stuff with macros, it becomes impossible to convert losslessly from TeX to any more structured format (e.g. docx; something like ps or pdf is less structured).

In other words, it can't operate on plain LaTeX files because someone not using LyX might edit the files in such a way that LyX can no longer handle them. By using their own format, while they don't prevent someone from editing the file without LyX, they can at least guarantee that a valid LyX file will always be loadable by LyX.

<comment><USER26> The weird thing is, LyX can in fact import LaTeX files, and dump any unrecognized command into a red box. If it were just possible to use the imported latex file, and keeping latex as the default format while avoid reformatting the entire file upon re-exporting it to latex, that would make the interoperation possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. My first experience in undergrad with LaTeX, I submitted the paper over 3 weeks late with a grade per week penalty and got a B+. I never asked the teacher about my impossible grade, but I would assume I had one of the best papers in the class; usually I'm not good at structuring papers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Relevant rebuttal: [http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2015/01/14/knauff-and- nejasmi...](http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2015/01/14/knauff-and-nejasmic- recommend-banning-latex/)

<comment><USER3> And another: [http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication- rev...](http://serialmentor.com/blog/2014/12/27/post-publication-review-of- the-plos-one-paper-comparing-ms-word-and-latex-how-not-to-compare-document- preparation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think that there is more fundamental cause for this correlation. See reference [https://mjambon.github.io/vim-vs- emacs/](https://mjambon.github.io/vim-vs-emacs/)

</comment><comment><USER6> surprising amount of conclusion from a small amount of fact.

I am not even sure time writing is worth optimizing in the first place.

BUT the evidence in increased errors and time lost might mean that the cognitive load of writing latex is higher, and that might be really relevant

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder which version of Word the study used. I couldn't find anything about that.

<comment><USER31> The following appears verbatim in the "Supporting Material":

> The study was conducted when most of the participants in the Word groups > used Word Version 12. Only 3 participants used older versions of Microsoft > Word. Newer Versions of Word include a new Equation editor that makes the > software even more powerful and easier to use.

The authors of the article are, obviously, completely unbiased.

<comment><USER32> I think one big plus for LaTeX is its slowly changing nature. Word was appalling 15-20 years ago for writing technical papers. If you gave up then and learned TeX/LaTeX, you're most likely over the learning hump by now and have just needed to learn the occasional new package.

<comment><USER21> On the other hand, with Word's vastly improved equation-handling capabilities, if you haven't gotten over the learning hump yet, there's a diminishing return for doing so.

I have, for example, never really felt the need, and learning LaTeX has always been binned for "It'll be slightly more of a hassle in Word, but it'll still be done today."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Org mode to LaTeX conversion makes the production much less time consuming.

</comment><comment><USER34> and I may suffer a loss of efficiency (time & effort, online-driving- difficulty, problem solving, required training) driving my standard transmission sports sedan compared to if I were to drive an automatic transmission minivan

guess what though

I prefer the sports car</comment>


New Language for Programming in Parallel - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38149/?nlid=nlcomp&nld=2011-08-03

<comment><USER2> Previous submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2815425> <\- This one has some comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816248>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2817190></comment>


Ask HN: "Smart" VCS with a built-in interpreter? - <AUTHOR>

Has there ever been developed a VCS that tracks changes on a semantic level? For example, if you change a variable name, then a "smart VCS" doesn't treat it as character updates, but rather as refactoring of a field. <comment><USER2> I've heard that Darcs had a plugin that did this, but it was hella slow (like much of the rest of Darcs).

It's generally a very hard problem to go from a series of character updates back to a semantic update. A lot of people say "Well, just parse the source code before check-in, diff the parse trees, and store the parsed representation." The problem is that a lot of information is discarded when you go from flat text to parse trees. Comments, whitespace, linebreaks, code- formatting, etc. What happens if you rename a variable, this makes the line grow longer than 80 characters, and that forces you to add a linebreak and reindent the lines following it? That's trivial for a human to do, fairly hard for an automated refactoring tool (trust me on this ;-)), and nearly impossible to reverse in a manner that preserves the original formatting intent.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use indentation provided by IntelliJ and it has always helped me indent _my_ code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What sort of enhanced user experience do you see this providing? Automated change summaries?

<comment><AUTHOR> \- More meaningful information about a particular commit.

\- Robustness of versioning. Certain types of errors will become extinct. For example, refactoring will update a variable in all 10 places instead of 9/10.

\- VCS can take on tasks of an integration server. The VCS now will be able to make sure that your project "compiles" before accepting a commit.

The real motivation behind this would be to make branch management easier, since the VCS has now more information.</comment></comment>


Mozilla Mozaic: visualizing the future of bookmarks - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/visualizing-the-future-of-bookmarks/ <comment><USER2> I gave up on bookmarks in normal web browsers. (I still use them on my phone.)

I have five or six permanent tab-pins in each of Firefox and Chrome, and about two hundred open tabs at any given time. Add in search engines and history suggestions, and I'm covered.

It would be nice if unused tabs gradually migrated to a bookmark list, I suppose, but we're already most of the way there with late-loading tabs.

<comment><USER3> Wait... you mention Chrome... and two hundred tabs open. Given that Chrome (very intentionally) becomes unusable before you get to 15 tabs even on gigantic widescreen monitors, how does Chrome manage to remain in your stable of browsers? I'm in the many-tabs crowd, but not so much to replace bookmarks. Bookmarks to me are 'this is a resource I will probably need later... likely much later'. Open tabs are 'I want to read this soon', and soon might be weeks later (though I usually get time to read on the weekends).

I gave up on Chrome when they took their perfectly usable vertical tabs implementation (which was an experimental feature you had to enable manually through the about:config page at the time) and just tore it out one day for no reason better than 'eh, we dont think that was a good design'. There weren't any problems with it. It wasn't holding back the development of anything else. Just some random dude at Google got a bug up his ass and decided to destroy Chromes usability for a few thousand users. And, of course, thanks to the whole invisible upgrade 'feature', the application just became unusable overnight with no mention.

Personally, I want the solution I've wanted for a very long time - tabs that remain open. Forever. At least, that is how it should LOOK, with the intelligent swapping and like going on in the background. When Firefox came out with the fullscreen tab manager with tab groups and everything I was so psyched.... and then I found out that Firefox actually keeps ALL of those tabs in memory. And you can't close a group and come back to it later. Useless.

<comment><USER4> Multiple windows with <= 14 tabs/window.

I don't push 200, but 80 isn't rare for me (going by TooManyTabs extension count). IME, Firefox slows down much faster than Chrome when browsing this way (on Win7-64 w/ 4-8GB of RAM).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Posting comments seems to be broken there for me (though I bet that's Ghostery's fault) so instead I'll post it here:

My biggest issue with the way browsers do bookmarks currently is that they force them into a tree structure.

They're not trees and I hate that I have to put them into one. Tags and labels are where they should be, more like the way things like delicious had them. Even though Firefox _has_ tags, they're not prominent and not the primary way of organizing them, so they're not as easy to use as they should be.

Of course each browser has extensions that provide things like what I want, but none polished enough to make integration seamless and make adding new bookmarks painless enough to use, at least so far as I've tried.

The other important thing for me is being able to clip portions of a page and being able to annotate a page with notes, references and comments.

For all of those reasons, I'm stuck using an even less tailored tool (Evernote) to do my bookmarks. So, here's to hoping that improving bookmarks ends up being the next frontier.

Oh and -- by the way, your email validation in the comments here is broken. It thinks +'s are not valid.

<comment><USER6> Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly 1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?

Also if we imagine some person starting bookmark list from scratch, with tags - he has to A) make complete tag system from the beginning (I've tried, it's not easy) or he'll be forced to re-tag old ones later; B) type in tags (or select) every time he bookmarks site.With folder trees I use one click to drag&drop bookmark to the intended place.

Tags are the future but only if someone would be able to automate them completely.

On sets with 10-100 bookmarks type of index system is completely irrelevant - you can even keep them in a plain list and still don't waste time.

<comment><USER5> "Sure, tags are clearly better than folder trees. But would you tag correctly 1000 bookmarks? Or 10000?"

I would if it were easier to do so.

The extra 2 seconds to do it is the bottleneck, so trimming that is the solution. When I click the star or hit ctrl-d in Chrome (I'm sure it's the same in Firefox), the title of the bookmark is in focus. I almost _never_ change that, so that's useless.

Put the tag field in focus, and make tags autocomplete. That'd put me most of the way there.

Of course you're right -- prepopulating the field with tags other people used would be a much further step.

<comment><USER7> The tag field is focused if I ctrl+d in Firefox. Which is very handy indeed.

<comment><USER8> Firefox has tag auto-complete as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm too lazy to tag my bookmarks so i hope there's a way to throw all bookmarks into 1 buckets and have some way to search just on those bookmarks. Is there a way to do that now?

<comment><USER8> In Firefox I just star and occasionally tag. Organizing bookmarks is not something I find valuable. Then using the (search filters)[[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-your- bookmarks-h...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-your-bookmarks- history-and-tabs-awesome-bar#w_changing-results-on-the-fly)] to find what I need.

* Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. * Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. * Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. * Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs. * Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed. * Add # to search for matches in page titles. * Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).

<comment><USER10> Wow, thanks. Looking for a bookmark in a tree was a pain, but now it's much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I still miss Powermarks (EOL-ed some time ago). Anyone looking to improve bookmarking owes it to themselves to look into it.

Amongst other things, it would grab a default set of tags from the page's meta-content. (Of course, this was back before there was so much gaming of same.) And tags were defined as a whitespace-separated list, which made manual tagging very easy and quick. Search was also a whitespace-separated list, with limited wildcarding. With several thousand bookmarks, it typically took me 1-3 seconds to drill down to the one I wanted. And it took only a few seconds to define a new bookmark with a sufficient set of tags that I'd be able to quickly find it again with an appropriate intersection (or, more likely, one of several possible intersections, depending upon what I remembered of it at the time of recall).

Of course, these days what with disappearing content and the like, one may be better off relying more on local, offline caching/storing of static content, á la Scrapbook, for example.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm an enthusiastic user of Pinboard but over the past few days I've been putting "permanent" bookmarks into Trello instead. This seems to be working out OK for me.

By "permanent" I mean things which I know I will want to refer back to all the time, rather than just things I might want to look at or read at some point in the future.

A good example of this would be a Trello board for recurring payment services, with a separate card for each provider (along with evaluation notes etc.).

I also have an extensive list of movies and TV shows to watch in Trello, and this approach allows me to categorise/rank/organise them much more easily than any bookmarking system I know.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm still a big fan of delicious. It's not just having my bookmarks decentralized and tagged, but also since it's easily accessible I can share any tag set with anyone I know.

I basically use it as a mass dump of everything I find remotely interesting on the internet. I just give links enough tags so I can find them again. That way I can use it as a first buffer before doing a full on search. If I want to find a chocolate cookie recipe I can just type in the tags "recipe cookie chocolate" and if I've tagged a recipe like that before I know it's quality because I've tagged it before. Even if I don't remember tagging it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mozilla! Ain't nobody got time fo that! Just index bookmarked sites locally so that I can haz search full text and show them hronologically! Please?

</comment><comment><USER15> Installed the beta of their preview extension and it does not look good for now. It is ridiculously long to load, scrolling is painful, and more importantly (as other points can be fixed), I don't like the user experience that is proposed here: it is painful to find a particular bookmark or topic, you end up scrolling through tons of them.

I rather use tags to organize my bookmarks, even if it is less visual.

</comment><comment><USER16> For this purpose I prefer to use personal wiki such as tomboy (<http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/>) or notational velocity (<http://notational.net/>). They both let me quickly organize my bookmarks along with notes in a hypertext format (imagine that)!

</comment><comment><USER17> Bookmarking, storing, saving - these are all important things that need improving, but the scope of this doesn't go far enough IMO. To make bookmarks useful the page needs to be archived (for when the page disappears, lost a few that way), with full text searching and notes/annotations help too.

</comment><comment><USER18> For me the future of bookmarks was just to re-Google. But somehow over time that became less effective.

Now it is Evernote. With the Chrome plug-in for Google search integrated it works _very_ well.

Why have bookmarks, clips, articles, other notes spread all over different services?

<comment><USER15> I like keeping the ownership of my data as much as I can. Also, I find Evernote really painful to use, especially for bookmarks. I had experienced it a while ago; coming from Delicious at that time; and I had found it painful and badly integrated in the browser.

<comment><USER4> Chrome and Firefox's URL/omni-bars will pull up partial match results for bookmarks.

As such, the benefit outlined by the grandparent post is available without having to hand that information over to a third party, unless you opt into a cross-device or cross-browser bookmark syncing service.</comment></comment></comment>


Tom Tryniski digitized nearly 50M pages of newspapers in his living room - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tom-tryniski-fultonhistory.php <comment><USER2> Tom T., I salute you. For the past 10+ years, I have used hundreds of scans in your archive to learn about my roots in small farming villages and factory towns in northern and western New York. Thank you for not selling out to Ancestry.com or Newspapers.com and keeping this resource free.

His devotion to old newspaper archives leads me to ask: How could vital records and other paper archives at the municipal level be digitized and indexed? What are the technical and legal considerations for such a project?

<comment><USER3> > How could vital records and other paper archives at the municipal level be > digitized and indexed?

The typical business model is for a company to digitize the ones somebody might want to look at someday and offer online access.

> What are the technical and legal considerations for such a project?

Legal: more than can be articulated here, but the FCRA is sort of the big one that covers much more than you'd think. Technical: buy a scanner or two.

<comment><USER2> In terms of scanners, are there models that can handle odd-sized books and ledgers, many in fragile condition? This is where many old vital records and documents reside.

Another issue for indexing: 18th, 19th and early 20th century handwriting styles. Many clerks had good handwriting, but with lots of variation in style, written over printed templates (marriage certificates, property and tax records, etc). How good are modern OCR technologies recognizing variations in handwriting?

<comment><USER3> There are a few different levels of digitization here if you're talking about something like a county clerk or a state office or something.

You can digitize the documents with OCR (or by hand) and process them with a level of precision great enough that you can archive or destroy the original documents and just print out a new document when you need it. One example would be the states that no longer issue a "real" birth certificate and just print one out on official letterhead when there is a demand.

You can index the documents and stuff them in the basement, which is pretty much the default for many county records. The computer is basically equivalent to a card catalog in that case. The database might very well be a scanned card catalog...

You can make a nice, pretty, OCR-enabled picture of the original document and store it on a database. Searchability can vary.

Things like signatures and cursive writing will often just need to be interpreted by a human during the process of digitization. If such records aren't important enough to justify a few minutes of someone's time, they might not ever be digitized.

There's a lot of variance here. A state agency like a Department of Motor Vehicles has a strong motivation to make things more efficient and the advantage that none of the records are really ancient. A county clerk in a poor, rural county has completely different resources and needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is something awe inspiring about people who spend long times doing something they love without expecting much in return, for public good. These are the projects that need to be supported so they are able to do it as long as they physically can.

Huge respect for not selling.

Anyone know of more examples?

<comment><USER5> Casey Neistat is someone who comes to mind. He has chronicled so many moments of his life on video and shared them with the world.

<comment><USER6> He's expecting something in return though, money from ad revenue.

<comment><USER5> Casey started monetizing his channel much, much later. In my view, the footage he has amassed and shared on Youtube over the years shares parallels with what Tryniski is doing, namely, he has provided people with a visual account of what it is like to live in New York City at a particular time in history. While obviously different than what Tryniski does in that it is more autobiographical, I definitely think it'll be significant if not now then in the future, especially as the city develops more and changes over time. There's been a lot of footage he has captured that only he has captured, e.g., [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKOdMA97FGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKOdMA97FGM)

<comment><USER6> Do you have a source for him monetizing his channel much later? The way he describes it in this video[1], he says he made a series for HBO (around 2010), then a couple films, then shifted his focus to youtube. It sounds like he considered it at that time his main income source. The youtube partner program launched in 2007. Even if he wasn't monetized right away, the idea of monetization in the future was likely a motivation. In this video[2] he describes his dream as making money making videos.

The video you linked was uploaded in 2016, certainly long after he started monetizing his videos. The title doesn't seem to be aimed at sharing information with future generations. The title is vague and non-descriptive. It's in all caps and clickbaity. The title is nearly the same as this over video of his[3] which is about a completely different event. Many of his other videos have vague clickbaity titles and thumbnails, sometimes the titles are misleading.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Y-ahQFQDA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Y-ahQFQDA)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ_z48aJD5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ_z48aJD5o)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJoDRUybisw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJoDRUybisw)

<comment><USER7> IIRC Casey Neistat didn't start vlogging daily until 2014

I've watched a vast majority of his videos. Some of his videos date back in early 2000s as well, during times he did work for local political campaigns

His motivation is making a living doing what he enjoys doing, which is telling stories. He's said that many times over already. Youtube was his way of bridging his experiences from cinematic private production in hollywood and bringing it to the masses so everyone can enjoy it. 368 is just his next brainchild after the downfall of beme

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Tryniski has no formal training in archiving and isn't particularly > interested in working with any of the various other online newspaper > directories, especially those with regimented archival requirements. He has, > on occasion, been approached by companies looking to partner with him or > purchase licenses to his archives. He's turned them all down, including one > offer for half a million dollars._

I do hope his material is free to be stored on Archive.org at least? Or perhaps even his entire website. It would be terrible if this resource would disappear

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that was sort of my reaction as well. It's great that the guy is doing what he's doing, and I respect his desire not to sell to some vampire-squid monetizer who will paywall all of it for revenue maximization, but ... what's his backup strategy? What's his estate plan? Does whoever is going to inherit his house know that there's more to that giant pile of hard drives, besides a task to be farmed out to 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

I am concerned that this entire effort is one sloppy-street-crossing or one house fire away from being gone forever.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its amazing that an individual, working just with their own time and money in their own house, is so outpacing efforts like that of the Library of Congress.

<comment><USER10> Not amazing at all. Those bureaucracies spent their time planning, budgeting, arguing, doing studies, etc., while Tom Tryniski just puts the microfilm in the scanner and scans it.

<comment><USER11> That's a neat soundbite, but it's committees, planning, arguing, and meetings that got us the protocols underpinning an open internet that are holding up decades later. Not to discount his work, but wouldn't it be great if he sat down with some people who argued for the best format to store and deliver it?

<comment><USER10> I talked to a museum archivist about this once. She was obsessed with getting the best scans possible with the best equipment and budget. So no scans at all were done.

<comment><USER12> Given that some book scanning processes are destructive, and the presence of a digital archive may be a pretext to dispose of the physical one, and you'll never get budget to digitise it again .. this may not be the worst decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not being ironic, I really like his website. Brutalism amateurs should take a look [http://fultonhistory.com/](http://fultonhistory.com/) That is the perfect example (on desktop), no regard for the design, still perfectly functional (including back button etc..).

Edit: just noticed the use of jAlbum for the gallery. Just adding +1 to nostalgia :)

<comment><USER14> Wants me to install something called flash, no thanks

<comment><USER15> Flash isn't necessary to use the site. It seems to be used for a PDF display portion of the archive search's split-pane view. The search results are displayed fine without Flash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somewhat related: _Nicholson Baker didn 't expect librarians to act like barbarians - but then he learned they were destroying or dumping millions of books and newspapers. He tells Oliver Burkeman why he had to take a stand._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17644080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17644080)

</comment><comment><USER10> He reminds me of the woman who obsessively taped local TV news broadcasts for decades, and wound up with the only surviving record of those shows. Truly an invaluable service both of them did and are doing.

<comment><USER17> Ah, yes, Marion Stokes: [https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue- sections/features-issue...](https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue- sections/features-issue-sections/16582/vhs-internet-archive-news/)

Wikipedia reports she left 71,716 VHS tapes of news recordings. The Internet Archive is on it.

<comment><USER18> This is a good time to remind everyone to donate to the Archive: [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one who feels that the author's withering rant about Tryniski opinions, and her blabber about free press is an undelicate and unneeded addition only to push some agenda ?

Like, is it really the point of his project ? Are his views expressed anywhere in his archives ? Why be so judgmental ?!

<comment><USER20> The CJR is a journal about the press; its writers' opinion that a free press is vital is nailed on.

I don't read it as trying to push an agenda (which I suspect the author believes is shared by her readers) but to explore the tensions between America's tradition of a viciously partisan press and its 20th Century ethic of studied neutrality, and of tensions between the press as abstract apple- pie-and-motherhood and distrust of actual publications (the archivist's selection of Fox over other media, and the observation that even in their heyday there was commercial pressure for small town press not to do investigative reporting).

If you find arguments about the state of the press distasteful I can see why you wouldn't like the last section. But I found it quite interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

</comment><comment> jay-anderson [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVWDX6oaYCg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVWDX6oaYCg) \- here's an older video about him. Pretty interesting. We need more home archivists (or whatever the proper word is) like him. There's so much stuff out there that would be interesting to search through.

<comment><USER22> > We need more home archivists

We are out there on r/DataHoarder, and on some obscure trackers like Myspleen. I hope that when I'm older I can preserve some history stuff as well for the greater good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks like we need more capeless heroes like Tom Tryniski!

</comment><comment><USER24> What Mr. Tryniski has done is more than admirable. But unfortunately he has failed in one aspect and that has to be as a leader. When he dies whatever number of pages have been archived all efforts will cease.

If he had volunteer helpers and a foundation he could will money to help them keep it going.

<comment><USER25> This guy digitizes over 50M pages for the greater good and you're calling him a failure?

<comment><USER26> "... in one respect"</comment></comment></comment>


PyCon US 2011 - Call for Proposals Reminder - <AUTHOR> http://us.pycon.org/2011/blog/2010/10/25/pycon-2011-reminder-call-proposals-posters-and-tut/ <comment><USER2> I'm hoping the new "Extreme" track brings out some great talks.

 _looks in Raymond Hettinger's direction_

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the reminder, otherwise I would have totally forgotten! It was a great experience doing a talk last year.</comment>


The middle class doesn't want a tax cut. It wants better government - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/27/the-middle-class-doesnt-want-a-tax-cut-it-wants-better-government/ <comment><USER2> The middle class referred to in the article is middle class of US. middle class of the bay area, might be a totally different story.

The article is basically saying, those who aren't paying any income taxes are quite happy with their income tax rate. Meanwhile, anyone who lives in a more expensive part of the country like CA/ Bay area is paying higher taxes: 30%-40% for most people, not counting all the taxes paid on the employers side as well as all the taxes you pay with the remainder of your paycheck.

Still, you might think, that's enough to live off. But, if you are working in high tech with a decent salary, you've only got so many years before you get aged out of the work force ~ 50 according to the other article: [http://www.businessinsider.com/stressful-lives-of-older- tech...](http://www.businessinsider.com/stressful-lives-of-older-tech- workers-2015-11?_lrsc=e525de47-81f1-48b4-bc62-2a1e336af828).

<comment><USER3> Except that even in the Bay Area you're paying a marginal tax rate of 30-40%, not an effective rate. They're different things. If you're actually paying > 30% effective federal tax rate you'd have to be earning > $600k (assuming married filing jointly)[1]. At that level of income, anywhere in the world at all, getting by and saving for retirement should really not be a problem.

1\. [http://www.effectivetaxcalculator.com/](http://www.effectivetaxcalculator.com/)

<comment><USER4> The federal income tax isn't the only income tax. There are also state, local, FICA, and medicare taxes. Add those in and someone with a $100K salary ends up in that 30-40% range.

<comment><USER5> Yep, if you file as a single person making $100k with the standard deduction, you'd pay right around 32% in total tax between State, Federal, and FICA. If you're a married couple making the same amount, you'd pay roughly 29%.

<comment><USER3> FICA contributions top out at $127k gross income. Someone earning $300k/year is paying the same amount in FICA as someone earning $127k. Which I actually think is unfair, but that's another topic entirely.

The standard deduction isn't the only deduction available.

If you're filing as a married couple and maxing out your 401k and/or IRA you're suddenly saving money and _gasp_ down a couple of tax brackets. A married couple making $100k jointly, and both working jobs with benefits, could put away $36k/year in 401k money alone, which is more than enough for a comfortable retirement after 30 years (and I didn't even take into account any potential employer matching). A couple with one earner can save 23.5k (18k + 5.5k traditional IRA).

If you pay for health insurance, more deductions. Ditto for FSA benefits.

If you have eligible educational expenses (kid in school/college, spouse getting another degree etc), same thing.

If you have receive commuter benefits through work (buying a parking or public transit pass)...you guessed it. (weirdly this is the only deduction you can take for FICA, which is otherwise calculated on gross income).

If you're itemizing deductions, there's mortgage interest, state tax, property tax, charitable contributions, car registration fees. I'm sure I'm missing more here because I don't itemize.

The point I'm making is, no one takes just the standard deduction. If you're going to add all the other taxes in, you really should count all the deductions you can take too. Add all that in and there's no way you should be paying anywhere close to 30%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am always amazed by the number of people who obsess on tax payments in isolation.

Even though my taxes are quite low here in California when compared to other places I've lived (France, Germany, Australia), I find overall it costs more to live here. Taxes + medical expense total more here than in those other countries. Fuel is cheaper but I have to drive more to get around easily. The schools are dreadful (and Palo Alto schools are supposedly the best in CA) so I paid a lot to get around that. Telecom is expensive (well, cheaper than AUS!). Etc. Not to mention that a strawberry doesn't taste like strawberry.

Americans seem to put up with huge transaction costs (both in time and money) to get some "savings" which seems backwards.

</comment><comment><USER7> \- The middle class should get a tax cut.

\- Tax code loopholes used by the rich to pay nothing should be simplified / removed.

\- Decamillionaires and up should pay more than zero, i.e., Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) isn't working except to snare the upper-middle class.

\- Corporate income taxes are far too low, and need to return to 1950's levels.

Unfortunately, doing any of this requires difficult-but-worthy fundamental changes first: campaign finance reforms, lobbyist reforms and basically a purge of corrupt politicians in DC.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like the repeal of AMT. Silicon Valley's equity options offerings just got a lot more attractive!

I don't like removing the state tax deduction from federal tax. With federal income tax not being marginal anymore it is the real percentage deal, and then you have to throw state tax on top of that? Yikes thats a big tax increase.

I LOVE the lowered corporate flat tax for entities. For some reason he throws in pass through entities like single member LLCs, which suggests that all the personal income tax brackets are a complete red herring since anyone can just form an LLC and get taxed at 20% instead. How is that not the main discussion?

It could all be balanced by the trillions in repatriation. Even though the US government could not count on getting trickled down tax revenues from all that money back in the economy, they could count on a lot of being parked right back in US treasuries, which is basically the same money in a different account.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm middle class and long ago soured on the tax vs deduction games. Better government would lead to more confidence that I'm not financing corruption. My perennial view, since I first understood what taxation was, has been dour. No event has changed that one bit.

<comment><USER10> That's quite sad. If people believe their government is broken beyond repair what future does the US have?

<comment><USER9> A car without an engine can still roll downhill. The US will continue to plummet into tyranny and corruption, like most democracies tend to UNLESS the information age results in an altered pattern and misinformation is trumped (pun?) by education. The post modernist corruption of education has resulted in a bastardized anti-establishment movement that focuses on the least important causes. I have little hope for the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> HN has a fair amount of international readership, so I'll ask:

It's my impression that the US government is fairly incompetent by first-world standards. I'm not just talking about the presidency, but about the total overall governance. Is that accurate? Or is it just that US news reports US problems more than they report problems in, say, Netherlands or Switzerland, so I hear about our problems and don't hear about theirs?

</comment><comment><USER12> I want a tax cut, thank you very much. The fact that this is from a publication owned by an entrepreneur famous for giving his company a billion tax cut is somewhat ironic.

</comment><comment><USER13> Im middle class and prefer a tax cut.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible for the Govt to make money without my taxes?

<comment><USER15> See Norway's sovereign wealth fund

<comment><USER14> I am looking for more of these kinds of ideas. I do not believe tax should be a function of Govt because Govt has become a function of two political parties with two different ideologies. There are incentives for both sides but it has become a biased system. I am looking for ideas that decouple tax from Govt. and the ideologies of political parties. If a political party likes to spend more then they should not raise taxes to achieve those goals. Also it does not inspire confidence that our Social security fund will not be sufficient though we are paying taxes because now people are living longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey all, middle class here and I would most certainly take the tax cuts.

Appreciate the out of touch media speaking for me as usual though.

<comment><USER17> "As a whole, the middle class doesn't want a tax cut. It wants better government."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> To be in the 30%+ tax brackets you would need an income of about $200k. The highest federal tax bracket is 39.6% so I'm not sure how you'd be in a 40% tax bracket. Additionally you'd need to be making much more than $200k to have an effective tax rate over 30%.

If you're concerned about state taxes, well, nobody is forcing you to live in that particular state. I'm not sure what your point is but even in SF if you can live off of $200k+ a year you're leading a fairly excessive life on average.

<comment><USER8> People only care about what they get to take home.

If you get hit with 30% by one institution, another 2% by the same institution in another category, and then another 10% by your state, people are going to say they got taxed 42%.

I have lived as a resident in 3 states. The combination of city, county, and state taxes has always been around 10% for me. You are right though, I could have emancipated myself while a minor and moved to Florida where there is no income tax. I could have chosen a different university where I didn't have a scholarship. And subsequently I could have lived anywhere after that and enjoyed the lowest tax brackets because of my lower salary.</comment></comment>


DNA could store all of the world's data in one room - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/dna-could-store-all-worlds-data-one-room <comment><USER2> Still waiting for a practical reason to use this tech, given the high cost, lack of experience, and relatively accessible conventional storage devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, there aren't many practical uses right now given the cost besides some niche ideas, but...

1\. High cost and lack of experience are not reasons to not work on the technology. For example, quantum holography or other experimental storage ideas are also extremely expensive. Doesn't mean we shouldn't push research in the area.

2\. We are reaching limits on how effectively we can continue to increase densities on conventional storage. It might not be this decade, but it's coming. This is why people are working on many different experimental technologies.</comment></comment>


Visual Q&A app Piqtr has launched (feedback welcome) - <AUTHOR> http://www.piqtr.com

<comment><USER2> I really dislike the name. It just sounds wrong when I say it (or think it).

Any plans on bringing it to Android?</comment>


Why Did Greenland's Vikings Vanish? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/ <comment><USER2> There appears to have been a similar end to the Ancestral Puebloans (commonly refered as Anasazi). It appears they were hit by a climatic shift and had several years of very extreme drought (to the point no rain fell at all), and other enviromental factors, perhaps related to overexploitation of trees, leading to erosion of watersheds and topsoil.

It seems that in the end, they just gave up and moved away south rather than dying out. The modern Hopi, aswell as other groups claim them as their direct ancestors. Hopi beleifs about sustainability, and "living close to nature" are pretty interesting in such a light. According to the Hopi, living a false, artifical life is a path to disaster and death, and destruction of the whole world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_mythology)

<comment><USER3> And the Maya of the Yucatán and Central America.

Current thought is that through deforestation they created an arid zone.

[https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2009/0...](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2009/06oct_maya)

Then drought and social collapse. There are a number of stories like this in the pacific as well, like Easter Island:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island)

For everyone who disagrees about climate change, it's hard to argue that on local levels humans can cause severe changes to the local environment.

Jared Diamond's, 'Collapse' is a great read on this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's only one very slight mention of the lack of fish in their diet in this article, which I think does injustice to a component that (I feel) is exceptionally important to understanding why the colony failed:

They did not eat fish.

Greenland has something like a 3-month harvest period, which is very, very little. Supplementation with seals only gets you so far, especially when the Greenlanders were _also_ focused on trophy hunting to offer tithes to the church back in Europe. A single hiccup in their harvest could lead to an irrecoverable overharvesting of seals and then the eventual starvation (or almost-starvation/exodus). Not eating fish!

<comment><USER5> This is also particularly weird since mainland Norwegians _do_ eat a lot of fish.

Jared Diamond's _Collapse_ goes into more detail about the Norse social hierarchy: apparently the upper classes ate a lot of beef, and seal etc was for the common man.

Incidentally, similar themes repeat elsewhere: the First Fleet that founded Sydney had no fishermen at all on board, and for a long time respectable people aspired to eat beef imported from England while lobster and other seafood was only for convicts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl,dr; simultaneously:

1) Earth cooled from Indonesian volcano eruption

2) greater competition from Africa for their chief export: ivory

3) Norway, their main sponsor, hit with plague

</comment><comment><USER7> I love the Norse-in-Greenland story because it's only just barely out of reach. It's only 600 years ago, they're Europeans, they had writing, correspondence, regular trade. I mean they were part of the Church! And then they just sort of disappeared and there's no contemporary record of why.

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone is interested in a good analysis of this plus the Maya and Easter Islanders (among some others), there's a book by Jared Diamond called "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed)

<comment><USER9> The article calls out Collapse as having been influenced by outdated ideas about why the Greenland settlement failed. For instance, rather than depleting the soil, it turns out that they worked to enrich it.

<comment><USER10> Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were devastated by the release of rats which ate their seeds. See "The Statues That Walked" by Prof.s Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawai'i for a more up to date work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That story was super interesting. I have always been fascinated by what has driven humans to explore. Human history as we know it seems punctuated by these inflection points of expansion. Post-expansion, we look back on how much progress was made, and yet expansions seem to only happen sporadically. I guess we might be able to conclude that expansion may be more common than what gets recorded, but only becomes sustained when it results in some type of major opportunity for the pioneers.

And even then, it seems as though expansion is a skill that gets honed by a society. I think of the Polynesians, the Vikings, and the Portuguese.

The value of ivory as a commodity makes a lot more sense out of why Vikings would have bothered with Greenland. It has always seemed weird to me that the Vikings made it past all of these hazardous lands to Newfoundland, but didn't really bother to do much in North America.

It's interesting that the article concludes in a rather off-handed way that Greenlanders didn't go native. I don't see why we shouldn't expect a few of them to have done so? I'm reminded a bit of Peter Heywood, from the Mutiny on the Bounty [1]. Although, I would suppose Tahitian life would probably be rather more enticing than Inuit life.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Heywood#In_Tahiti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Heywood#In_Tahiti)

</comment><comment><USER12> When a page takes up 1/3 of the display playing an obnoxious advertising video with sound that can be neither minimized or dismissed, they lose the right to complain about ad blockers.

<comment><USER13> "When a restaurant charges more than I want to pay for their food, they lose the right to complain about me leaving without paying"

<comment><USER12> You're missing the point -- it's not an objection to advertising, it's an objection to advertising that cannot possibly work, that alienates consumers.

Consumers aren't the only people who must live in reality -- advertisers must live there too.

<comment><USER14> Ever since the influence of Edward Bernays, advertisers and consumers don't live in reality, and big companies make more money than before.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > fjord Hvalsey, which means "Whale Island"

Is this a correct translation? I thought fjord meant inlet.

<comment><USER16> Fjiord means firth (sea bay, strait, inlet, maybe even sound, etc.)

Fixed misspelling of strait.

<comment><USER17> Fjord or Fiord is more or less the same word as Firth.

It was spelled Firþ in old English. Not sure what's going on with the 'o'. It turned into Fjärd in Swedish. At least on the east coast.

<comment><USER18> In Icelandic (which hasn't changed much since the settlement of Iceland) it's "fjörður". In Old Norse it would've been "fjörðr".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is a fun little boardgame that models this interesting chunk of history.

[https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/156501/greenland](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/156501/greenland)

<comment><USER20> Yes, i have it, it's a very nice game. There is a Vassal module as well. [http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Greenland](http://www.vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Greenland) For a more conventional board game on Greenland, Vlaada Chvatil made Graenaland [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24843/graenaland](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24843/graenaland)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The idea that the Greenland Vikings would assemble to hunt down sea mammals and that they would rely upon a partial diet of seafood is a compelling idea. After all, fish has always been an important staple of food along the Norwegian coast. Also, to this day, the inhabitants of the Faroe Island conduct annual, communal whale hunts (or "whale killings" as they call the tradition; there is a fair amount of blood involved). The Vikings knew farming but they certainly knew fishing as well.

</comment><comment> castle-bravo Jared Diamond devotes a whole chapter of his book Collapse to this question. The one cause that struck me the most (Diamond only mentions it in passing) is that they apparently didn't eat the fish.

</comment><comment><USER20> For a novel set in Norse 14th century Greenland read: "The Greenlanders", it was written in the style of epic sagas.

"Once, in very early winter, when Margret was in the hills above Vatna Hverfi laying partridge snares, a man came upon her suddenly, and gave her a fright. He was wearing a shirt and hood of very thick sheepskin that fell forward over his face, so that she didn't know him, and when he stepped out from a willow cleft, where he had been doing something, she jumped back and gave a cry. As she stepped back, her foot rolled with a loose stone, so that she would have fallen, except that the man caught her elbow and held her up.

There was a man at this time living above Vatna Hverfi district, who had committed the crime of killing his cousin over a horse fight, and had been outlawed for three years by the Thing, although in Greenland outlaws were allowed to live at the fringes of the settlement, sometimes among the skraelings and sometimes not, since there was no going abroad as there had been in the old days. This man was named Thorir the Black-browed, and so, when Margret regained her balance, she said, "Thank you, Thorir Sigmundsson," and backed away from him, for it was not known how he had been enduring his time of outlawry. Nonetheless, although she was afraid, she took three fat ptarmigan from her pouch and laid them side by side on a flat rock at her feet, saying, "You would do me a great favor by accepting these poor birds, Thorir Sigmundsson." Then she backed away, slowly, not taking her eyes off the outlaw and feeling her way with her feet. The man neither looked at her, nor picked up the birds, and after a while she was out of his sight and she ran the rest of the way to Gunnars Stead. The next evening, when she came into the farmhouse from the dairy, the three birds, all neatly plucked, were lying on the bench beside the fire. Margret went at once to the door and surveyed the homefield for signs of the outlawed man, for there were many reasons why such visits were not a little to be feared, and the fact tthat they were contrary to the law was not the least of these. Vigdis, the wife of Erlend , for one, would be glad of something new to bring against the Gunnars Stead folk. Aside from this, an outlawed man living above Isafjord had gained entrance to an isolated farmstead and stolen a great deal of food from both the kitchen and the storehouse, althouh the tale that he had killed a member of the family had turned out to be false. But there were no signs of anyone except Olaf and Skuli, who were standing near the cowbyre. Margret took the birds outside around the house and buried them in the midden with a spade."

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14305.The_Greenlanders](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14305.The_Greenlanders) [https://www.amazon.com/Greenlanders-Jane- Smiley/dp/140009546...](https://www.amazon.com/Greenlanders-Jane- Smiley/dp/1400095468) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Smiley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Smiley)

<comment><USER22> Tempting, thanks. Wasn't one of the original Norse sagas about Greenland? I haven't read it either, but I can say that Njal's Saga (mainly on Iceland) is very good.

<comment><USER18> Indeed, you're thinking about this one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_saga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_saga)

<comment><USER22> D'oh! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The fate of Greenland's Vikings—who never numbered more than 2,500

> Amid that calamity, so the story goes, Greenland's Vikings—numbering 5,000 > at their peak

I'm not sure how to resolve this contradiction. I wonder which number is correct?

<comment><USER24> The article says 2500 is the new number, 5000 the "old story".

<comment><USER23> Ah, makes sense. I didn't catch the distinction that they were making. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Legend has it that Erik the Red basically named Greenland deceptively to attract people to go there. Why the Vikings might have vanished from there could be traced back to this bait and switch naming: expecting something green, and finding most of it rather white most of the time.

<comment><USER26> Vikings colonies survived on Greenland for hundreds of years, so while chuckle-worthy I don't think this is a reasonable explanation.

<comment><USER25> Still, the place name could well have retained its deceptive power for hundreds of years, coloring people's expectations.

For hundreds of years, Viking real estate agents had a field day thanks to the name, I suspect. Every minute a new sucker is born, among Viking's too.

Also, the Vikings wanting to get the hell out of Greenland would continue to have an incentive to lie to the ones who had never been there: like to be able to sell them their assets that are fixed or that they don't intend to take.

Had Erik called it "Frozen Wasteland", that would have been it. No hundreds of years of settlement, nothing. The few lunatics would continue to have a hard time convincing anyone else to join them.

<comment><USER26> If you read the article, you'd see the colony survived for a few hundred years even after trade with the mainland stopped. This is not a reasonable theory. Greenland was not peopled by clickbait marketing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HostDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Flipkart/HostDB <comment><USER2> It sounds like it's a lightweight version of the Foreman [1] with less integrations for virtual servers and configuration management? In any case I starred it to keep track of future updates...

Just as a curiosity, CERN uses something similar to this (LANDB) as its source of truth for the physical infrastructure. [2]

[1] [http://theforeman.org/](http://theforeman.org/)

[2] [http://landb.sourceforge.net/](http://landb.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER3> This keeps getting reinvented, because using LDAP for this sucks.

Google had slack, which mapped MAC address -> roles

Yahoo had Igor, which did nearly the same (which used yinst, which had package activation for rollbacks)

Then we saw Puppet/Chef do the same thing, except with conf files you can check in & version control.

This was reinvented again in Yahoo! for hadoop with Zookeeper, for an even shorter life-span roles. Also now with zookeeper doing elections and such, within itself.

Zynga used Zookeeper to build their own role management system, but added the Igor like features into it and started using it as an C&C master to push file/code updates with.

I see that possibly several more people will reinvent it, because these solutions start out as something simple and grow out into an feature-creep mess & then someone reinvents an easier solution, rinse repeat.

And all of them will be the right answer, except for people who are not using it :)

<comment><USER4> HackerDB was mentioned in the Q&A session after one of the config management talks at the Usenix LISA conference last week.

I'm glad there are tools like this being actively developed.

I think perhaps the reason they keep being redeveloped is that the current crop of open source CMDBs doesn't meet needs, so I gladly welcome projects like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been trying out a few different options in this space. I'm doing work with Docker, and in certain scenarios I'd like my containers to 'learn' their configuration at startup. I initially spent some time trying out Etcd which came close to fitting the bill, then Redis, then I just packed it all in and rolled a rest-service for them to talk to (the config data was pretty small).

My particular need has come close to disappearing since the advent of Docker linking, but linking doesn't help when containers have an unscheduled restart. If one of your app's dependencies (ie database container) IP has changed post- startup, you need a way for your app to learning about it. That's where I see the value of things like Etcd and HostDB.

</comment><comment><USER6> What would be more interesting is a modern framework and standard around querying inventory information. Something that's min implementation requirement is simple enough for consumer products to implement, and scales up to enterprises. And of course supports handling legacy/current discovery methods as well.

Seems like the main issue would be there's only limited case where inventory systems are currently needed, and the existing systems aren't completely broken just yet. But you can imagine at some point, being able to track and manage all of the devices in your home will be a big issue, and there may be an incentive for companies that produce enterprise and consumer goods to not have to develop and maintain duplicate standards. At that point it seems like it would drive some more innovation here.

In the meantime, my preference is to query data in real time form its source (e.g. AWS, VMware), vs. syncing data to a CMDB like database. Unmanaged physical inventory of course still requires a CMDB like database.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tumblr has a tool named Collins, which they refer to as a configuration management database (CMDB).

[http://tumblr.github.io/collins/](http://tumblr.github.io/collins/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Flipkart had a blog post about this, which has some background, screenshots etc.

[http://tech-blog.flipkart.net/2013/10/hostdb/](http://tech- blog.flipkart.net/2013/10/hostdb/)

</comment><comment><USER9> good to see a indian startup open sourcing one of their internal tool.

only question why perl and fcgi? why not golang, python or ruby for it

I last used fcgi 6-7 years back when that was the only option to host rails apps.

<comment> X-Istence Why not FastCGI? It is just another way to connect from the web server to a long running app, just like WSGI is...

<comment><USER9> most modern apps and frameworks dont recommend FCGI

Rails deprecated its use 4 years back ( [https://github.com/rails/fcgi_handler](https://github.com/rails/fcgi_handler) ), FastCGI is deprecated in Django as well( [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/) )

common pattern is a reverse proxy to a C based server with or without evented loop with some reverse proxy/load balancer, or some compiled implementation in jvm, golang, beam etc

<comment> X-Istence I am familiar with Python ... and I can understand that FastCGI was never really supported in the first place there, especially since Python has WSGI.

I am not as familiar with Ruby.

But just because "modern apps and frameworks" don't recommend it doesn't mean it is a bad protocol. PHP with PHP-FPM is awesome and well supported. Fast CGI still has a place in this world, and I don't see why just because some apps/frameworks have decided it isn't worth their time to support it, it would be an invalid choice to make for a new app...

<comment><USER9> perl is a language which has not seen any new adoption by developers, same is true about fastcgi. they were the best/state of the art 5-10 years back

was it a design decision or they chose it as no alternate mechanisms/libraries is available in perl.

these decisions are important to know for a open source project, it will determine its adoption, number of contributors, and will it flourish

<comment><USER10> _> perl is a language which has not seen any new adoption by developers..._

This is incorrect. Perl is still seeing good adoption by new developers.

Now your argument could be that it probably not at same rate compared to some of the _top_ languages around at this moment but Perl is still growing.

Some facts...

\- CPAN continues to grow - [http://cpants.cpanauthors.org/stats/uploads](http://cpants.cpanauthors.org/stats/uploads) | [http://cpants.cpanauthors.org/stats/authors](http://cpants.cpanauthors.org/stats/authors)

\- According to this tweet Perl still produces more new repos on Github than languages like Scala, Clojure & Go - [https://twitter.com/dberkholz/status/395922559151009792](https://twitter.com/dberkholz/status/395922559151009792)

 _> was it a design decision or they chose it as no alternate mechanisms/libraries is available in perl_

No idea what their decision criteria was however they are plenty of alternative mechanisms/libraries in Perl.

See PSGI/Plack for Perl's _state of the art_ solution - [http://plackperl.org](http://plackperl.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like a lightweight ZooKeeper.

[http://zookeeper.apache.org](http://zookeeper.apache.org)

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems to be a use-case for `etcd`.

</comment><comment><USER13> chef or puppet has very similar functionality, where is the target audience of this tool?

<comment><USER14> Can you query them for servers of a specific type? This sounds more like a service registry than a configuration management system to me.

<comment><USER15> Puppet has an inventory system. They call it PuppetDB, but it's basically an interface to an SQL database (eg., PostgreSQL) where the main Puppetmaster process will stores all the information it compiles from manifests. It's a simple schema which allows you to easily query all the hosts, resources and so on.

An interesting side effect of PuppetDB is that it can be exploited within the manifests themselves, via what's known as "exported resources" [2], allowing nodes to gather information from each other. For example, a web server module can declare that it exports a URL endpoint that needs to be monitored. Then the Nagios module can declare that it wants to know about all URLs to be monitored. The syntax is a bit weird, but it's a rather elegant system.

[1] [http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetdb/1/](http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetdb/1/)

[2] [http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/2.7/reference/lang_exporte...](http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/2.7/reference/lang_exported.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congratulations, you have reinvented DNS. You can even pretty much s/HostDB/DNS/g:

        DNS: an old tool to help manage data center inventory and write
        applications around it.

        DNS is our attempt to solve the problem of finding hosts and
        their purposes in a large environment. DNS acts as a Single
        source of truth about all Physical and Virtual servers and is
        used to define their purpose. It helps us group our servers
        through domains and all the software written by the operations
        team revolves around DNS. DNS acts as the centralized
        configuration store for all sorts of information.

<comment><USER17> You must not have read past the introduction. I just skimmed it, but it's clear that this stores considerably more information than DNS.

<comment><USER18> DNS can store whatever information you want to put into it.

I agree it's not necessarily going to be that practical for larger items of data, though.

LDAP would be a better comparison, though I can't say I fault people for reinventing LDAP on a regular basis given how annoying it is to work with.

<comment><USER16> It can be practical for very large records if, say, you use a NAPTR record to point at a web server which serves the actual contents. It just requires a little out-of-the-box thinking. They can both use the same SQL backend so everything is still in the same database.

In this regard, DNS isn't broken and doesn't need fixing. HostDB seems especially obnoxious since it also stores the FQDN and IP address of each host, information which ends up being duplicated in DNS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tupper's self-referential formula - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupper%27s_self-referential_formula

<comment><USER2> Primary discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567064)

Of course, that's very old, so comments are closed there. If you have anything to add, you'll have to do it here.

</comment><comment>==

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6056759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6056759)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5109066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5109066)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025487)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571367)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=942903](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=942903)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603878)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85599)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9313)</comment>


GitHub playable version of The Conception (browser-based 7-day roguelike game) - <AUTHOR> http://ondras.github.com/conception/

<comment><USER2> It really took me some time to find out what this is about but it becomes obvious when you are near the target :-). Great job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :-) It requires some imagination...

<comment><USER2> Come to think of it, one can nearly consider this a 'serious game' (though I don't like the term much) or it could be enhanced into this: after all it describes the ... process in quite an entertaining way.

It even explains why sometimes losing is a good thing. :-)</comment></comment></comment>